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College is for Dummies

2009-12-20 Update: There is value in higher education but there is a lot of baggage that goes along with it. Consider both sides before quitting college or going to college.

A college education is thought to be a requirement for success in modern America. We swallow, hook, line, and sinker, that higher education is an unassailable good. But what if it isn’t?

• Revisionist history. You get to learn that our founding fathers were unchristian, that the American Indians were peaceful savages, and that the Earth would be better off without humans. Then you’re tested on this, and you’ll “fail” if you don’t give the right answers.

You got enough of this in high school; do you have to subject yourself to four more years of it?

• All the great entrepreneurs skipped college, or dropped out as soon as their idea went big. (Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, the creators of Google and Facebook, etc.) If the college experience is so inherently valuable, why would anyone leave as soon as they started making lots of money?

• A continuation of high school . . . The modern Associate of Arts degree is nothing more than a repeat of what you were supposed to be taught in high school. You aren’t gaining any “specialized” skills for your place in the workforce, nor any “life experience” that you wouldn’t be better off acquiring on your own.

• The whole idea of going to college to get a job, to “appeal” to your employers, is all that higher education stands.

• Algebra. Who ever thought that you should mix letters with numbers in math? In the computer science degree I’m working on, I have to go through five courses of this nonsense (algebra, precalculus algebra, trigonometry, calculus 1, calculus 2). All of it completely unuseful to the math problems that will pop up in my life, or any math problems that will appear in computer programming (none of the major programming languages use algebra anyway; it’s too complicated and esoteric). The only reason to learn algebra, is if you’re going to become an algebra teacher.

• No intrinsic value. Today’s college education has no value on its own. Any value it has is assigned by our society or mainstream employers, for the sake of continuing the college charade.

• It’s a job. But unlike a normal job where you’re paid to work, you work for free and you pay them. Then, you get “graded” on your “performance”? Is this for men or for mice?

• Most of the people who are going back to college, are going because they can’t find a profitable venue on their own, have given up hope, and accepted their place in this juvenille system. You’re going to be surrounded by weak people with broken spirits in most college class rooms. Are those the traits you want to rub off on you?

• Start life in debt. Who pays their student loans anyway? Even if you’re not in debt, you’ve wasted years of your life.

• An imaginary safety net. There is no safety. Safety is an illusion. When you can’t find a job and nobody wants your college degree, tell me how safe you are.

• Go to college to be home-schooled. For every hour in class, you’ll need to do two or even three hours of writing and studying on your own to get the actual work done. But when you learn on your own, you must learn what is proscribed, not what could be interesting or valuable to you.

• Toe the party line. You’re required to use gender neutral language and other newspeak. You have to agree that global warming is real, that we need socialized healthcare, that we need to murder our young and old (abortion and euthanasia). You will be tested on this stuff, and don’t you dare step out of line if you value your grades.

• An exercise in Marxism. The purpose of the public schooling system is to indoctrinate our children in the principles of communism, under the veil of community, democracy, socialism. It’s the same thing.

Wake up. College is a monumental waste of time and energy. You’re being jerked around like a cuckold.

I understand some of your points except that you can’t be a doctor if you don’t go to medical school. I wouldn’t trust a street doctor who had not gone through training and successfully graduated to operate on me. Same thing with nurses who have to give out medications or administer procedures, and pharmacists, architects, and certain types of engineers. Even computer programmers have to read books and learn the languages rules. Of course all the mathematics in school might never be applicable in real life, but it’s a kind of brain exercise to help you to think in different ways, different areas of knowledge. Once you become a programmer, you’ll never know what kind of application you’ll work on. Just like if you plan to be a doctor, you might not know if you will be a cardiologist or brain surgeon. You can’t limit your knowledge just to the heart or the brain. You should know the whole body at least. It will be too bad if a computer programmer doesn’t know anything about math or chemistry. Stay out of the politics. There is no right answer. Just because there are people who take advantage of the welfare system doesn’t mean that the ones who really need help deserve to be banned. You never know someday you might need socialized health care. It’s the quality of the people and the people in the government that need to be improved, not the idea of socialized healthcare if bad.

I disagree that we should have no public money set aside for education because it is not within every parents capability to educate their children and many families have to have both parents working. But I take massive issue with the wastelands our public schools have become. In any other business arena disruptive people are removed, forcibly if necessary. But in public schools, disruptive and messed up little kids suck up way more than their share of resources & the teachers’ attention. The same way kids are required to have certain shots before they go to school they should be required to have certain behaviors down, such as basic potty skills, being able to sit still for 15 minutes, understanding how to behave in a classroom, respecting the teacher and so on. If their teachers document that these behaviors are not present, the child is sent home, and there are special very unpleasant schools that you have to pay for to teach these children basic skills. I guarantee you the parents will teach their kids those skills if they are losing their free babysitting.
Then, there is none of this coddling. Once you get in school you learn the stuff or you stay back. How is it that we have kids in 6th grade who can’t read? Everybody in first grade passes a reading test to get to second. Then at seventh grade we send them all out to camps for two years of farm labor because nobody learns anything in middle school anyway.

Public schools used to expel trouble-makers, but not anymore so they can maintain funding. Both parents wouldn’t have to work if not for government largess, including public schooling. Fifty years ago, a husband could support his family with any reasonable job, but now two working adults won’t cut it. It’s not that we’re less productive or efficient; it’s the government dragging everyone down.

I agree with you on this…
Especially in Pennsylvania with the PSSAs. All that kids are learning is how to take tests. They are not learning to learn anymore…
This is all because of Bush’s FAILED “No Child Left Behind” program. If the kids that are in learning support and those same kids score basic or below basic on the PSSAs during their senior year, they will not get a diploma.

There is no point in standardized testing.

Also, the kids that show that they excell in school get piled and piled with extra work on top of that the normal kids get. This is not right. If you show that you are smart, you should get different work. Not the same work with all kind of different work piled on top of it.

It’s easy to talk about what our public schools do wrong, but that doesn’t get to the root of the problem: we shouldn’t have state-funded schools to begin with. It’s your parents’ responsibility to teach you, and if they care about you (as most parents do) they’ll do a far better job than government baby-sitting.

Public schooling is a mass waste of citizens’ money, because it’s a monopoly with no competition. You have to pay for it on your property taxes and sales taxes all your life, even if you never send your children to public school.

Also, high schools often have a jail-like atmosphere.

If you’re at school 6 hours a day 5 days a week, that’s plenty of time for you to learn reading, writing, and arithmetic. All else is secondary, and there’s no need for homework.